"Attentiveness—Concrete and Sublime"

Attentiveness is a fundamental element of Iyengar Yoga. We start practicing it in the basic standing posture, Tadasana, the mountain pose. From the very first direction, “Join your feet” we learn to transfer focus from our head to what is most distant from it, our feet.

The most direct experience many of us have of our feet is in their relationship to shoes or as convenient or sensitive pads on which we stand. In Tadasana, we experience our feet in reference to the earth. We contain and steady our awareness by distinguishing, activating, and balancing the discovered parts of our feet. We learn to concentrate and replace the unconscious flow of thought patterns of the mind with the experiential intelligence in our toes, metatarsals, and heels. As we develop our connection with the foot’s system of arches, our feet become wellsprings of energy we can use to fuel our entire being.

We trace and cultivate the way this intelligence extends to all parts in our legs and into the support of our trunk. We go on to move, extend, contract, repeat, and sustain—all the time practicing the suspension of the unconscious flow of our thoughts. Postural patterns give way to the direct experience of balance and alignment. We discipline our mind by consciously connecting to the earth, an increasingly intimate reference.

As we continue our journey into Tadasana, we learn to engage our hands and arms as well as our feet and legs into a condition of integrated and activated stillness. The hands and arms are on their own in the air. Mental training through the hands and arms is done without the support of an exterior concrete physical reference point such as the earth. The fingers reach into outer space and the arms guide us through the shoulders into the physical heart and breath space. Referencing from space, we can gradually increase our capacity to live fully within our own space. Increasing conscious control of our breath brings immediacy to the reality, timelessness, and egolessness of space.

The expansion of the experience of our body and breath provides a counterbalance to our usual experience of ourselves as mind. We can replicate new states of being, practice after practice, moment by moment, spanning earth and space. We can choose how to direct not only our hands and feet, but also how to reach into our own experience of time transcending universality. Attentiveness indeed bears fruit.

                                                                        - Mary Dunn

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